3. Rather than wanting a green or leftist in charge, I hope Rand Paul becomes the next president, even as I
share the hope of many that he comes to sound more radically libertarian.

It’s disturbing to see the ease with which my some of my
fellow libertarians dismiss the unique opportunity Paul offers, perhaps
overestimating other candidates’ libertarian tendencies. I’m sure many Paul
fans are hoping the media jumped the gun with dismaying (but ambiguous) reports
the Kochs might back Scott Walker, who is not a libertarian, rather than Rand
Paul.

Gary Johnson may be the favorite of some libertarian
purists, but he’s not a pure libertarian himself, talking of “winning the War
on Drugs” by “taxing marijuana” (at least prior to becoming head of a legal pot
company), instituting a national sales tax, and humanitarian military missions.
None of that renders him non-awesome, but, like Paul, he’s less than a perfect
anarcho-capitalist.

4. Despite the tireless efforts of hawks to push the
simplistic idea that any event anywhere in the world is a refutation of
military non-interventionism, I think messes like
that in Yemen right now ought to make us more cautious about blundering into
such regions, and I think Rand Paul would be more cautious.

5. That doesn’t mean he has some rosy, optimistic view of
the world -- nor do I. On the contrary, the discovery of oil in the ground
frequently means barbarians acquiring unearned
resources, or at least regimes that now have less incentive to cultivate
commerce and peaceful conflict resolution.

I saw a talk at Half King bar by journalist Tom Burgis,
author of The
Looting Machine, and his book recounts how the discovery of natural
resource wealth in Africa so often causes conflict, corruption, and other political
problems -- including resource-monopolizing regimes suddenly becoming so rich
they don’t even care whether their citizens are wealthy enough to pay taxes. Some reformers think the world would be better off if the resources were
just left in the ground. I hope it doesn’t have to come to that.

6. Yet, as the left often notes to its credit, the political
and military consequences of using oil have to be placed on the “cost” side of
the ledger just like the environmental risks. Oil now helps fund the terrorists
of ISIS, and if Bush were still president, I suspect the Mexican
authorities warning of an ISIS camp just across the Texas border in Mexico
would be seen as a particularly
negative and newsworthy side effect.

8. Benjamin Hall (disclosure: who has the same agent I do)
is not blind to ISIS’s evil. He traveled in the regions where their fighters
are taking over and brutalizing, raping, and decapitating prisoners. His useful
book InsideISIS: The Brutal Rise of a Terrorist Army
explains where ISIS came from and the stomach-turning things they do.

As is usually the case when you look at the details of such
a movement, the simple right-wing and left-wing U.S. explanations of their
motivations do little to capture the rather alien and theological internal
logic that guides them. Trying to shoehorn them into some Western theory such
as anti-colonialism -- or a conspiracy theory about them being mere Western
pawns -- won’t help you understand how they rationalize the mass-rapes and the
destruction of museums, but it’s not too mysterious if you see the brand of
Islam they’re pushing.

But agreeing that they’re especially terrible -- as Rand
Paul, for one, does -- does not necessarily entail agreeing with hawks’
preferred solutions to the problem. (Paul’s transformation on the road to
Damascus, so to speak, has not caused him to forget our bad track record of
intervention over there.) Are we really to think that if we’d just backed the
Free Syrian Army things would be peaceful and free there now? The FSA, that
would be the
guys who kidnapped an NBC reporter and then tried to make him think they were
allied with both Assad and Shiite
militias, presumably to get the U.S. to fight both those rivals?

I believe Hall is pained by the horror he witnessed over there
and wants to help, but that’s no proof that the McCains of this world will know
who to back and where to send weapons if we get more deeply involved. As Hall
himself chronicles in the book, the U.S.’s situation in the Muslim world is now
so multilayered and complex that, for instance, we are currently supporting
those fighting with Iranian-backed
Shiite militias in Iraq (to prevent its government falling to ISIS) and
supporting those fighting against
Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Syria (despite
simultaneously wanting its government, run by Assad, to be toppled, even though
he’s the most active anti-ISIS force in the region).

I do not question the empathy of someone who says the
region’s murderers must be stopped, but I question the sanity of anyone who
looks at that tangled mess and says without much hesitation, “Let’s get in
there, and then things’ll get sorted out!”

10. Hipness is a real threat to totalitarians. Here’s NPR’s half-hour
interview with a punk in Cuba whose life was changed when he heard Led
Zeppelin but had to watch in frustration as even the Wall coming down in Europe
did not lead to greater openness and freedom in Cuba (h/t Dave Whitney).

11. Iraq certainly used to be hip -- the very cradle of
civilization -- a few thousand years ago. Their music may
have sounded like this haunting number (h/t Richard Cooper). And don’t be
afraid that if you click it’ll just be the B-52’s “Mesopotamia.” It isn’t. Not
this time.

13. It should be clear by now that my wariness about the
hawks does not mean that I’m sympathetic to Islamic totalitarians or the
left-liberals who coddle them back here in North America. I can’t even stand
the kind of wussiness that leads to student activists -- a coalition of
ostensibly-pluralistic leftists and Muslims, as happens with growing frequency
-- saying they can’t cope
with the movie American Sniper being
shown.

(They ended up showing it after all but in a de facto double
feature with Paddington, which only
makes the whole scuffle more ridiculous -- but hey, if that left the kids
sympathetic both to efforts against
Islamic totalitarianism and to the right of bears and others to immigrate, I
guess there are worse outcomes.)

14. Will the mainstream press be any more eager to foster
debate as
it lurches leftward with decisions like the picking of the new Face the Nation host?

15. An un-p.c. eagerness to let the truth just hang out, so
to speak, is a healthy but lately unpopular thing. I would hate to see the U.S.
end up so swaddled in p.c. taboos that discourse here becomes like, say,
discourse in Turkey (just across the border from Syria), where you won’t hear
many people daring to refer to the Armenian Genocide
when that horror is remembered in two days.

(Here’s hoping two of my favorite Armenian-Americans do well
at the back doctor and this coming Saturday’s Electoral Dysfunction panel at
the PIT, by the way, not that these events are otherwise related.)

Let’s just say it’s not clear after an incident like that
that more tearing down of “white privilege” and greater respect for
marginalized populations is sufficient to create justice.

17. Nor should that be taken to mean that whites are awesome.
Neither
eastern nor western Ukraine looks very admirable right now, despite elites
pressuring you to take sides in that conflict. The neutral, individualistic
administration of property-based law should be what matters, not tribal or
nationalistic grasping for collective power.

18. Of course, imaginary war on other planets is still fun, as we all know from watching the Force Awakenstrailer (and as some know from watching the brief teaser
trailer for next year’s spin-off Star Wars movie Rogue One before that trailer got taken off YouTube).

19. The consensus seems to be that the Star Wars ones
inspire greater confidence than the gloomy Batman
v Supermantrailer,
though the sci-fi fan in me doesn’t mind the whole “fear of Krypton” angle in these
films.

20. Less remarked upon is the fact that the Fantastic Fourtrailer looks bland. Let
us keep our (stretchy, invisible, rocky, fiery) fingers crossed this trip into
an alternate dimension leads to some excitement.

21. The Hateful 8
trailer from Tarantino being released and then yanked at about the same time
the four mentioned above debuted mainly strikes me as further evidence that
Tarantino (who threatened to sue over a leaked script not long ago) and the
Weinsteins may be in denial about how little control auteurs have over the
Internet these days. That trailer was leaked once before about, what, a year
ago, man?

Maybe third time will be the charm.

22. But now I’m straying away from topics like war and heresy
to more familiar econ subject matter. I’ll make May a “Month of Economics” on
this blog, kicking off on May Day with a look at philosopher John Tomasi and
his critics.

Maybe I should dedicate next month’s blog entries to Madonna,
who had the courage to praise Thatcher on Instagram -- until the lefty mob
demanded she take it down and she complied. So much for being an unapologetic
rebel and all that.

Monday, April 13, 2015

It’s a land of heretics! Let’s look at some old ideas and
new ideas of radically varying age and worth.

1. Nowadays, instead of excommunicating people, the
mob just blocks them on Facebook or insults them on Twitter, which is a
great improvement, though you know these people vote and would behave in the
same censorious way using government if they had the chance.

2. For an ambitious
overview of how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all dealt with their heretics
from mid-First Millennium through early Second Millennium, check out Christine
Caldwell Ames’s book Medieval
Heresies.

Two important lessons are that these faiths were in contact
-- and learning from -- each other even back then but were always very worried
that contamination by the wrong ideas whether from within or without could
imperil everyone’s souls. Yet all three faiths allowed for some degree of
internal debate and diversity. When did that diversity tip over into
unforgiveable heresy – and when did these faiths decide it was all right to
call in the state as enforcer, often executioner? Important stuff.

4. There is a season, Turn, specifically the second season of Turn, starting tonight on AMC and based
on a book about George Washington’s spies by yet another historian I know, Alex
Rose (he not only had his giant visage on a digital billboard in Times Square
because of it but saw the show’s cast members get to ring the NASDAQ
closing bell).

5. But both the real historians noted above may be
hard-pressed to compete with faux-medieval adventure Game
of Thrones, which debuted its fifth season (roughly speaking based on
the fourth book) this week, giving me new hope that the series will pull ahead
of the books in another couple seasons, so I can at least watch without any
fear of spoilers from people who plan to read the seventh book.

6. Speaking of Game of Thrones, the leftist cadre trying to
take over the sci-fi Hugo Awards lately sound
a bit like this.

7. Modern-day white knight Joss Whedon’s version of reality’s
just about as skewed, as Sonny Bunch’s great EverythingsAProblem tumblr mockingly
notes here.

8. Despite earlier hopes, it appears I will not be in a
documentary about fans of Sharknado, but
we still have Sharknado
3: Oh Hell No! to look forward to this summer.

10. Rev. Jen’ll probably be condemned by someone as
unfeminist for having scantily clad hot chicks in her films, but then,
feminists are hard to keep happy, as this
piece from Spiked about breasts reminds us.

12. But worse -- arguably even abusive toward kids given
some of their latest ideas -- are some activists in the “trans” movement, which
sometimes defends people who need defending but
is at times (h/t Timandra Harkness) perhaps the most retrograde and barbaric element of our current political culture.

23. By contrast, May 22 brings Human
Centipede 3 (Final Sequence), and the idea behind the film, a prison
that fuses people into one organism against their will, reminds me of
government. Socialists may basically be sociopaths not so unlike the mad
scientists in these films. (Would that socialism’s wisest critics weren’t
themselves so often mildly autistic, though; someone’s gotta do empathy.)

24. Real-world violence looks more
like this much of the time, though, despite there being few arrests for
that sort of dumb melee. (There is violence among cops and non-cops, and it’s
OK to deplore both, by the way.)

30. And you can’t expect most people to have a handle on the
real history of WWII these days, as
J. Arthur Bloom reminds us here, looking at Socialists and the war with
more nuance than you’ll get from the privilege-checkers and woe-toters.

31. To compensate for all this old-fashioned talk, here’s a glimpse of the fashion of the future, at least as
imagined back in the Art Deco era (h/t JulieAnn Hull). Speaking of which, I
think they should have set the final season of Mad Men in the mid-twenty-first century and given everyone
60s-style jetpacks and flying cars a la The
Jetsons -- that’d throw viewers for a loop. (It would also help assuage the
pain some feel from DC Comics destroying Earth-2, the original, old-timey DC
Comics Earth.)

32. In other arts news, a
Ukrainian pianist got fired in Canada for purported hate speech simply for
saying she feared the western-Ukrainian government was committing atrocities
against people in the Russian-allied eastern part of the country. This strikes
me as a disturbing combo of Canadian weakness on free speech, U.S./Western
stubbornness on the slightly ambiguous Ukraine issue, and, perhaps most
creepily, quiet elite fanaticism on the
issue of who controls Ukraine.

33. I for one got an out-of-the-blue e-mail from a
Yale professor insisting Russia
must be beaten -- and maybe it is important, but it’s striking how important it
seems to be to the kinds of people who, say, influence firing decisions at
symphony orchestras (people sort of like Soros or the Ukrainian-gas-company-affiliated
sons of John Kerry and Joe Biden).

This time, the elite failed to really get the rest of
us hyped up about their war scheme, right or wrong, so when they freak out
about someone like a pianist taking an opposing view on the issue, it’s a bit
odd. It’s like being denounced for saying you don’t think the energy minister
of Portugal is the new Hitler or something, leaving you chastened but thinking:
Who? What? Is that beyond the pale now? Huh?

34. So much fighting in the world is really about gas pipelines
and energy, of course -- but that doesn’t make every crackpot alternative
energy scheme worth it, as Johan Norberg discusses in this
new documentary coming to a PBS station near and paid for by you (h/t David
Boaz). Might as well get your money’s worth.

40. With time, even
“yes” can die (h/t Eric Schmidt). Not the band, I mean, but, well, actually,
maybe the band as well.

41. Words change, I mean. I thought “Monopoly” meant
“boredom” when I was a kid because the board game was such monotony. Amazing I
wasn’t also confused about why they called it a “bored game,” actually.

42. But remember: no matter what they tell you about the
barbarism of the Middle Ages, the present looks
like this (then again, I still don’t see any arrests happening, so I guess
there’s technically no crime in this neighborhood at all).

This is the sick fantasy those purportedly “pluralism and
tolerance”-promoting liberals live out in their sick, hateful minds every time
they get near even the most innocuous of conservatives or libertarians. They
must conjure demons because we aren’t demonic enough in real life.

Has Jill Sobule worked with David Byrne at all? Because it
strikes me this is roughly how his sort of liberalism works: attribute the
nastiest imaginable motives to your foe, then congratulate yourself for
defeating the straw man conjured by your own hate. This is not what generous
listening or civility or dialogue look like. Modern liberals have become --
what’s the word? -- ah, yes: bigots.

47. I’ll attempt to be funny myself when I’m onstage on the
Electoral Dysfunction panel this Saturday, the 18th, 6pm (not 7!!) at the PIT, 123 E. 24th, if you care to come
cheer me on amdist politically-mixed company onstage and off.

48. And here on the blog, I’ll discuss the important book Inside
ISIS next time.

49. There’s even chimp/drone warfare
going on these days, as Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

1. Like the rest of you, I’ve spent the past several years
making mocking comments about enemies and rivals on the Internet. But there was
a deeper meaning to my activity even when making brief, dismissive remarks
about longwinded professors or filibustering politicians. (I don’t just want
argument or the rustling of jimmies.)

Truth be told, I’m a
rule utilitarian -- that is, someone who (really) wants everyone to be as
happy as possible and thinks we need a few relatively simple moral and legal
rules to make that happen. As a very left-wing friend of mine once wisely put
it, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice
can’t be the actual set of moral rules we’re supposed to follow because it’s
500 pages long. That’s a joke, but it’s sort of true.

A lot of complex political theorizing must be dispensed with
quickly (perhaps even snidely) if
we’re to keep people focused on the few easily-promulgated ideas that work,
chiefly property rights, which are a radically-decentralized and easily
understood way of settling nearly all political and economic disputes with
clarity. Veer away from strict adherence to that legal rule, and you quickly
get into messy territory in which everyone sounds full of competing metaphysical
and social theories out of Hegel. No good person wants that.

To their credit, though, people do tend to want some sort of
peaceful political compromise most of the time. If people aren’t going to sign
on to strong property rights as that simple conflict-resolution formula, I must
at least partially respect those whose looser political formulas (A) approximate that ideal and (B) seem
similarly rooted in a (broadly) libertarian desire to enable everyone to get
along with each other (as opposed to silencing some in favor of others’ master
plan).

Take, as conflict-resolution-formula examples, the
federalist/constitutionalist conservatism of Rand Paul and the pluralist liberalism of Jacob Levy.

2. I’m delighted to see Rand Paul formally announce his
candidacy for president at noon today
in Kentucky (though that linked video from yesterday has a bit more fat,
sunburn, and cultish chanting than I might have used if I had edited it). His
efforts to blend libertarian and conservative thinking with outreach to the
left confuses some but seems to me quite in keeping with his father’s use of
constitutional, states’-rights thinking as a means of settling deeply divisive
arguments in America in a civil, freedom-respecting fashion.

I don’t think young libertarians (delighted as I am by their
growing numbers) really appreciate how unprecedented it is to have someone as
libertarian as Rand Paul as close to presidential electoral success as he now
appears to be, whether he ultimately prevails or not. This is not an
opportunity to be lightly dismissed.

I can understand people avoiding all entanglement with the evil realm of electoral politics, but I’m
baffled, really, by how anyone can intensely dislike Rand Paul while loving Ron
Paul. No one ever seems to give
me a good answer, merely pointing out some tiny flaw of Rand’s (usually falling
in any area that many minarchist libertarians would consider a moral grey area
anyway) that often as not was even more
trueof Ron. They tolerated Ron
holding office, supporting Israel’s strike against emerging nuclear facilities
in a nearby country back in 1980, voting to authorize the Afghanistan war in
2001, working with more moderate political allies in Congress, occasionally
voting for the best available (least-statist) of several competing bills, and
so on. Why are all these things monstrous when Rand does them?

And Rand does them without wandering off into conspiracy
theories or dizzying run-on sentences about banking.

I mean, he’s far from perfect -- he’s a politician, for one
thing -- but in the current context, I think he’s clearly our best bet (as does Cato’s
David Boaz). Sit out the whole process if you like, but I question whether
anyone backing any other major-party candidate is serious about radically
shrinking government and expanding freedom. (And as a strategic sidenote, I’ll
repeat something I said about the elder Paul’s 2012 run: If and only if the Republicans nominate
Paul, then Gary Johnson, who keep in mind is no anarcho-capitalist himself,
should suspend his Libertarian Party campaign.)

4. I’m amused by the unusual length of what is apparently Rand
Paul’s official campaign slogan:

Defeat the
Washington machine. Unleash the American dream.

It’s got a certain poetry. Bit more badass than “Hope,
Growth, and Opportunity.”

And, hey, he’s got J.C. Wattsin
his corner, which may help with his ongoing black-outreach thing.

5. I wish ethnic calculations didn’t matter at all, but
clearly they do when crunching vote totals. The Hispanic ties of Jeb Bush,
Rubio, and Cruz -- even Romney -- have clearly been an implicit part of their
resumes, which is not unreasonable. After all, we now live in a country where a
friend of mine just this weekend overheard a woman describe her daughter
being bullied for not speaking Spanish and being told by teachers that until she learns Spanish she should expect to be
bullied.

6. We must come to grips with multiculturalism and
pluralism. That’s where the two books of Jacob Levy come in, respectively. The
second, just out, is Rationalism,
Pluralism, and Freedom, and it’s great.

There are many different ways of carving up the political
realm (I hesitate to say “spectrum,” since that’s most definitely one specific
model and perhaps a tired one). I’ve long known, roughly since we were
undergrads twenty-six years ago, that Jacob’s not fighting the usual right
vs. left battle, but neither is he fighting the usual individualism vs. state
battle that occupies libertarians and socialists alike.

His liberalism is a middle way, not only within the usual American
spectrum but within the history of liberalism itself (in the broad sense that
includes both individualist classical liberalism and modern statist
liberalism), conceptually if not necessarily in terms of any specific policy
recommendations. Like Vartan Gregorian, the man who was president of Brown when
Jacob and I were there -- and like no small number of Burkeans and even
paleoconservatives, though Jacob might not want to be associated with them --
he admires de Tocqueville and emphasizes civil society’s intermediary
institutions (from churches to universities to bird-watching societies, those
entities that are neither individualist nor statist).

He describes both
the methodological individualists (like most libertarians including me) and the
statists as rationalists but thinks
(like many academic left-liberals) there’s a neglected strain of liberal pluralists in intellectual history who
have more to teach us about how multiple sets of lawlike customs can coexist.
(There’s some similarity here to anarchist David Friedman’s online
book-in-progress Law Codes Very Different
from Our Own, which surveys gypsy, Amish, and other rule sets.)

Jacob is describing the European experience, he says, not
that of the U.S. or other parts of the world, but there is an unmistakable
resemblance to the letter he wrote to Liberty
magazine over twenty years ago reminding me not to be too dismissive about the
Amish, and indeed I’ve come to see them as a model of practical anarchism
regardless of their conscious philosophy. The Constitution, and American
liberty in general, can be thought of more as a truce, he told me, than as a perfected rational philosophy. Aiming
for the latter may be asking too much.

If boosting the left or right is a doomed proposition
because of their co-dependent relationship in which each move by one causes a
countermove from the other side, perhaps (depressingly) the same is true of the
classical liberal/modern liberal tension (individual vs. state). A way out of
the bind may be needed: pluralist liberalism as a path between the
individualist-rationalists and the statist-rationalists. As a practical
strategic matter, it might well be so, even if that’s still a messy, not
tidily-resolvable path by the abstract standards of philosophy.

I still think real individualist philosophy --
methodological individualism and Austrian economics -- has barely been tried
(despite all the hate already directed at it by the left). In my experience, it
catches on rather well when explained to people without compromises and mushy add-ons, and it achieves wonders on
the even rarer occasions it’s implemented. We should at least give that a more
serious try, I think. But Jacob offers a far less-statist route than the currently
dominant crop of liberals.

Liberalism has
a real history, though, not just
abstract theories, and even traditionalists may be surprised how much they
enjoy seeing Rationalism, Pluralism, and
Freedom weave important lessons from that centuries-long conversation and
the real social conflicts that produced it and shape it even today.

7. As an aside of particular personal interest, I must say
Jacob’s main argument against pure anarcho-capitalism (or Nozickian pure
liberalism, as he frames it) is a pragmatic yet hypothetical one: What if
you’re stuck in a world where all land is claimed by groups with strict customs
to which you must adhere, and the best you can hope for is to choose among
those groups? How is that individual freedom?

Fair enough, but as a rule utilitarian, I must ask: what if
popularizing theories other than
anarcho-capitalism is the fastest way to create a world in which people are
routinely stuck in restrictive rule-making groups that claim all surrounding
land and don’t like to sell it or allow for individual diversity? That seems
far more likely to me. (Even in an unlikely world of vast, inescapable, repressive
anarcho-capitalist compounds, though, we could presumably pursue some small Georgist
fix such as limiting the ownership of land in emergencies rather than go the
more intrusive route of telling people on a given parcel of land how to live or
what forms of autonomy and personhood they must foster.)

The impure
capitalist theories may thereby be more self-refuting in practice than is the pure theory, which is so rarely even
spoken aloud. The pure theory may confront difficult hypotheticals in extreme
cases, but the impure theories are already causing disaster in reality.

8. By my atheist-anarchist lights, the worst-case scenario
philosophically, though, is the theist-socialist. Having recently come out as
super-Christian hasn’t made the ludicrous Ana
Marie Cox averse to using
force against her fellow Christians for left-liberal ends, for instance.

9. There are, I will admit though, extreme cases in which
private action borders on state-like coercion, as a recent documentary and this
old article argue is the case with Scientology. But does either the
anarcho-capitalist or the Levyan pluralist really have reason to single out
Scientology for criticism among all the other restrictive religions and cults?
Short of assault and fraud, we largely have to let people do what they want.

10. The first person Jacob footnotes is Larry Siedentop,
who I
blogged about last time -- and who earnestly pushes that (rationalist)
individual-and-state model in his book despite, ironically, dealing almost
exclusively with intermediary church institutions in his analysis. But Jacob
has learned from an array of influences without necessarily endorsing
everything they say and also thanks people like MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. He’s
a peacemaker and bridge-builder.

11. By contrast, the once-useful Southern Poverty Law Center
has become an antagonistic, alarmist joke and instead of defending blacks
against oppression is now reduced to calling black doctor and Presidential
Medal of Freedom recipient Ben Carson an extremist threat. I think we’ll
survive him, SPLC.

12. The Indianapolis
Star front pages seen nearby, from forty years apart, are a reminder
(h/t Mollie Hemingway) how far we’ve fallen from protecting basic liberty to
imposing a left-liberal cultural agenda.

13. For good or ill, Jacob might more or less agree with
both headlines, though. Witness the nuance in his
take on the whole Indiana gay legal fracas. He’ll irk many hardcore
libertarians, in this case managing to endorse anti-discrimination laws
and the morass of common law on the meaning of “public accommodation” even as
he condemns the Indiana law as ugly, redundant, and purely symbolic all at the
same time. Yet that’s consistent with the cautious view in his new book that
principles are derived from the thicket of history instead of standing wholly
outside that thicket.

I would often prefer philosophers to stand outside history
shouting “Wrong!” Admittedly, political science professors have a different
function and way of approaching problems than (often simplistic) pure
philosophers -- but my basic objection to the political scientists’ usual
approach is that no one but professors and lawyers has time for all those
details. Saying so isn’t anti-intellectualism. It’s a (mildly but realistically
populist) recognition that the experts will take over and centralize decision-making
if no one else can follow the conversation.

15. And the current perpetually-outraged left, unlike, say,
right-wing pizza-sellers, are not just
acting like opinionated customers in the market. They are urging state action
and knowing they’re likely to get it (they already have, meaning that this
whole “Indiana Law” venture, started by religious conservatives, is basically
going to end up making it harder to
discriminate legally in Indiana than it was before all this began).

If, as Jacob himself has argued, Jim Crow was pernicious in
part because it so thoroughly entwined public and private authoritarianism, the
same is true of the mounting collaboration between the government and the
cultural left in our own day. It is the left, not the right, that is
pushing things farther and farther toward open violent confrontation in the
streets instead of voluntary pluralism.

17. Liberalism changes over time. The Economist changes, too, alas, with former Party of European
Socialists intern and Marxist literature major Jeremy Cliffe, who
narrated a TV show saying we should take Russell Brand seriously, becoming the
new Bagehot columnist (h/t J’Lien Sorbo and Guy Fawkes’ Blog).

I am reminded of sitting at the Economist table at a Reason event and realizing only one member of
the Economist group was a
laissez-faire advocate and the others thought he was a funny relic (and catch me in politically-mixed company again
onstage April 18 at 6pm (not 7!!) at the PIT in one of their Electoral Dysfunction
panels, 123 E. 24th!).

18. I fear this new Bagehot columnist will not do, say,
interviews that embarrass the Green Party prime minister candidate the
way this
one does (h/t J'Lien Sorbo). If you can bear to hear 3min 42sec of the most
painfully awkward political interview in history, that’s a typically snide UK
interviewer effortlessly destroying a completely flustered Green Party
candidate for prime minister who admits she hasn’t done the math(s) on public
housing costs, despite it being central to her platform. Brutal.

19. Back in the U.S., though, I wonder sometimes amid
overblown battles about race and abortion, on Twitter and occasionally even in
reality: do modern liberals today consider it more urgent in the days
ahead to fight the battles they won decisively fifty years ago or the battles
they won decisively forty years ago? If you see what I mean.

20. Speaking of Twitter, I predict Trevor Noah will
in fact cave under criticism and mute his offensive comedy. He joked in a
recent stand-up routine (h/t J’Lien Sorbo) about how Charlie Hebdo basically
had it coming, so while he’s stupid and offensive, he’s not the champion of
free speech that Patton Oswalt is. He’ll do what the left wants. Alas,
Voltaire, etc., etc.

21. Society has become so leftist-hypersensitive so quickly
that there is now a controversy raging within the comedian community because one of their own made a joke about
another comedian (who herself does a lot of low humor) being a fat woman with
one arm. Think about that: COMEDIANS ARE HANDWRINGING (those that have two
hands) over COMEDIANS joking about OTHER COMEDIANS and about THE “COMEDIAN
COMMUNITY” NOT STEPPING IN FAST ENOUGH TO CRITICIZE IT. That’s how fucking
sensitive the idiot-crybabies composing this society have become.

23. Anyone who claims not to see how government regulation,
p.c., terrorism, and the police state all encourage each other now, slowly
melding in an overall presumption against liberty and thought, is either
very naive, very ideological, or insane. I have rarely been more pessimistic about
the culture in my adult lifetime.

28. I don’t know if the dwarf-tossing jokes in the Lord of
the Rings movies were appropriate, but my complaints would be more
comedy-driven than offense-driven. If they were going to do awkward references
to current-day culture, though (something Tolkien himself was not entirely
above -- note his golf jokes in The
Hobbit), one I would like to have heard is Gandalf saying, “The Ents speak
in low tones, always a powerful bass. You should hear an Ent whistle.”

29. That crossed my mind while watching the cool documentary
Lampert and Stamp about the Who’s managers, which ends up being
a very intimate look at the early band as well. It also made me realize
Townshend’s reason for saying elsewhere that he dislikes Zeppelin: They nearly
stole Moon and Entwistle! Small world. (And Stamp is the brother of Gen. Zod, I
now know.)

30. Far from ours being a hopelessly patriarchal world that
silences female voices, I could
probably turn anything with tits and a political opinion into a successful
pundit. You have no idea how desperate and eager TV is for women. But believe
what you like.

31. Meanwhile, it sounds like Mindy Kaling’s brotherought
to make a fact-based mildly conservative comedy film called Oversoul Man.

32. As one very wise friend of mine put it, if X-Men were
real life, much as everyone loves its liberal metaphor for oppression, we
wouldn’t see Sentinels hunting down mutants, we’d see people saying it’s time
for Supreme Court Justice Ororo Monroe.

34. This look at the campus left is not
a bad summary of the current
situation (and colleges, alas, tend to be a model for the future).

35. But I have not forgotten that more moderate figures like
Michael Bloomberg can do even
more damage (don't help him, Boris!!). They more easily rally a consensus
and perform bipartisan mischief. Everyone is terrible, really.

37. In the modern world, by contrast, do liberals actually
believe this nightmare
scene will occur with any frequency? (And what church does the
gentle-sounding yet resolutely racist
old man belong to anyway?)

38. I mean, sure, it’s something that could happen once in a while, sort of like these five minutes of
clips from Night of the Lepus
(h/t Franklin Harris).

40. I read Grant Morrison’s Ultra Comics #1, in which
a central character pleads with the reader to stop turning the pages because
the story itself is evil and must not be completed, and I’m pleased to see
multiple people online voicing my suspicion -- that Morrison at some point read
the terrifying Grover-from-Sesame-Street
book The Monster at the End of This Book.

Jacob similarly joked about Hegel being the monster at the
end of his book.

41. Immigration
is crucial to Jacob’s thinking, I now understand, in part because it’s vital to
avoiding that trapped-in-enclaves effect that would make anarcho-capitalism
become creepy. I see NYC, for its part, might give a million non-citizens the
right to vote. Frightening! We could end up with a communist mayor who
honeymooned in Cuba. Oh…right. Never mind. Same dif.

42. Wariness of abstract model societies makes Jacob
admirably averse to most formulations of “social justice,” and from the ButtHurt Libertarians
page comes a scary reminder of what Atlas
Shrugged might sound like if Ayn Rand had believed in so-called social
justice:

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his
shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees
buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the
last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore
down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him?”

44. And in a simple reminder of the clash between modern
fragmentation and the echoes of the old paterfamilias
that Siedentop describes: an emotional farewell, one of the most memorable
scenes in TV history, from All in the
Family (h/t Mark Judge).

45. All of the tensions described above, much as we may
fight about them, are trivial, of course, compared to some of the
life-or-hellfire battles of the Middle
Ages -- and we’ll look at those next time in the form of the new book Medieval
Heresies by Christine Caldwell Ames.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Sixteen brief notes
on religion, tribalism, and science for this weekend of Good Friday, Passover,
and Easter.

1. First, since we atheists get accused of lumping all
religious people together, let me assure you I don’t think the people
celebrating those holidays this weekend are the moral equivalent of the
mass-murdering al-Shabaab movement attacking Kenya this week. I mean, you’re
still wrong, but you’re not al-Shabaab
wrong.

2. And unlike some of my pro-science, skeptical,
libertarian-or-progressive colleagues, I realize modernity and its scientific
comforts are sometimes oversold. I mean, look how dangerous my local Dunkin
Donuts is -- “imminently perilous to life,” if we believe the sign in my nearby
photo.

3. Driving is also insanely dangerous and may be looked back
upon as a mistake by robot-chauffeured future generations, albeit at times a hilarious and
spectacular one.

In a way, it is the very earliest part of the book,
describing the ancient, pagan, pre-Christian world, that may be the most
persuasive part, though this was not really the crux of Siedentop’s
argumentative plan. Like a good sci-fi fan/philosophy buff, I think it’s
healthy to be reminded how utterly alien the world could be if things had gone
a bit differently, and the world before the rise of the Roman Empire, as
Siedentop sketches it, is one in which each household, contrary to the
communitarian picture sometimes painted by nostalgists from Karl Marx to the
Republican Party, is nearly its own moral universe.

You think we have a patriarchy now? Be grateful we no longer
live in a world in which Dad is the paterfamilias
who wields the power of life and death over family members and household
servants, is the high priest of the household religion and ambassador to the
household gods/ancestral ghosts, and is himself a sort of god-in-waiting whose
soul will literally join others beneath the hearth fire when he dies. That’s
some serious manly responsibility.

A glimpse of that strange world will leave liberals,
conservatives, and libertarians alike breathing a sigh of relief when Greek
philosophy, Christianity, and modern notions of rights successively arise --
though there are some on the very far right, mainly in Continental Europe, well
aware of Christianity’s role in fostering liberalism and thus opposed to
Christianity, believe it or not.

To most modern readers, even the world of feudalism, strange
and ornate as its rules are, looks more familiar than the world of ancient
household gods. For instance, I may not believe in Marxist class analysis or
feudalism, but even our rough ability to map one onto the other and thereby
talk about broad swaths of rich and poor medieval citizens is a step closer to
home and away from the world of ancient slaves.

Christianity is liberalizing in Siedentop’s story, though,
for reasons that very much lump together individualist classical liberalism and
statist modern liberalism: As appeals to a single moral law centered on God or
the Pope or the monarch became more common, emphasis on hierarchical and
hereditary local traditions often gave way to the belief that the law applied
to “all souls.” Centralization, individualism, and egalitarianism may all fight
furiously against each other in our modern minds, but they were all
bundled-together novelties back in the days when many people assumed entirely
different sets of laws and moral rules applied to, say, serfs, Gallic monks,
German warriors, immigrant slaves, and so on.

Ironically, though churches very clearly fall into the
middle realm of “intermediary institutions” (between the individual and the
central state) in today’s society, Christianity’s biggest effect in Siedentop’s
medieval narrative was arguably the weakening
of (older) intermediary institutions. The very idea of a universal natural law was a radical condensing of
Greek, Christian, and modern notions that greatly influences us still. If your
neighbor insisted that his ancestors conferred upon him the right to take your
sheep, you might increasingly refer him to the widely-known laws of God and the
king instead of just consulting the locals, long story short. Property was
increasingly seen not just as a product of history but as an expression of
individual will.

Along with this change, argues Siedentop, came a subtle
shift from the centrality of fatalism to hope
-- and admiration for the egalitarian model provided by monasticism. And, as
I’ve often noted, feminism may bash the conventions of courtly love now, but
they were a nice formula for creating civility toward females compared to some
of the alternatives -- and still popular in many quarters. As the harsher and
more patriarchal rules of Islam are increasingly imported to Europe today,
Siedentop thinks we’d do well to stop bashing religion-in-general and,
paradoxical as it sounds, see secularism as an outgrowth of Christianity, an
outgrowth on more stable and lasting grounds if we acknowledge its pre-secular
roots.

In what might be called a “progressive conservative” way (if
not for the danger that that label would lead to me be mistaken for a
Canadian), I’m more inclined to think that religion was, as Christopher
Hitchens once put it, “a decent first draft” and that we can do even better in
the future -- but unlike some leftists, I don’t want our pre-scientific roots
ignored, denied, or treated as a mere enemy. Christianity helped.

8. Undermining the old paterfamilias formula hasn’t made the
world hunky-dory, after all. Beloved sensitive liberal guy Tom
Hanks is the dad who raised this thug, for example, so something went wrong
with that approach.

13. I can reject governmental controls (right and left) and
admire science and technological progress, as did my very funny and nerdy high
school biology teacher, who has passed away. Robert
Ochs was, as I recall, a libertarian, an occasional mocker of the ignorant,
and an early adopter of all-in-one remote controls for the modern home -- when
not taking vacation/astronomy field trips to Jamaica. He is missed.

14. Science is sometimes seen as arrogant in its pretense of
objectivity by admirers of religion (and vice versa), but sometimes science
unsettles you by making you realize how bad
your brain is at registering
reality objectively (h/t Austin Petersen).

15. This video
(h/t Justin Stoddard), a bit like a cartoony seven-minute fusion of Jonathan Haidt’s
warnings about “the righteous mind” and Richard Dawkins’ descriptions of
ideas-as-memes, reminds us partisanship and passion carry dangers even online.

16. For useful models of navigating pluralism and heresy,
come back to this blog in the next couple weeks for looks at books by Jacob
Levy and Christine Caldwell Ames -- and catch me onstage at the PIT 6pm (not 7!!) April 18 surrounded by liberal
comedians. I may mock your religion and your government.